Glute Exercises T Nation

Glute Medius The Weakest Muscle in Your Lower Body

What's up, guysé Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX . I'm going to show you today how to addressthe most underdeveloped, weakest muscle in your lower body, bar none. By doing so, we're going to help to improveyour big lifts. Like the squats, dead lifts, and certainlyany single leg activity because the muscle group that we're talking about here todayis the glute medius. Unless you're having a concerted effort inyour programming to train this muscle, you're

probably not doing it and you're leaving yourselfexposed to a lot of other damage down the kinetic chain. Most of that in the knees because we knowthat if you have weakness and instability up at the hips it's going to affect the positionof the knees and that most often will result in too much torque, and pain, and injury inthe knee. So what we can do for the glute medius is,we can do this in a lot of different ways. The first way to do it is to get up here againstthe wall, okayé Lift up your leg here.

This is not the leg we're actually workingbecause in order to get the glute medius, what we want to be able to do is abduct thehip straight out to the side. Now, when we do a closed chain it looks alittle different than it would traditionally as people know as abduction of the hip. This way. Straight out to the side. Well, when we do with our foot fixed on theground and you drop the hip out to the side, you're actually squeezing in.

you can see if I kept it going it's not differentwith the hip ending up out here on the outside of my body. So you will just allow yourself to get lazy. Drop down to the side. Allow your hips to drop down in this direction. The only thing that can actually bring themback up now if you do this right is the contraction right here of the glute medius, leaving itstraight across. Sideways.

You should feel it tightening right here inthe hip. Right in the butt. You come straight across and you try to liftyour hips up even a little bit more at an angle this way. You feel the squeeze, you let it drop andget lazy. Feel the squeeze, let it drop and get lazy. If you can't do 20 of these in a really slow,contracted way, squeezing every single time without the burn becoming something you can'teven tolerate, then you really, really have

weak hips. Even doing exercises like the squat when you'rebeing told to keep your knees out as you go down is going to become very difficult foryou and is going to be somewhat problematic when you try to keep your knees healthy whenyou're doing squats. But you guys know that there's different levelsfor different people. We can make this more difficult by addingsome resistance. So if we find that our athletes are strongenough in the bodyweight version then we add the ball.

Hamstring Muscle Cramps WEAK GLUTES

Chris: Hey, Jeff. This is Chris from Arkansas.I'm 34 and I've been a member of AthleanX for the last 8 to 10 months. My quot;Ask Jeffquot; question is: When I try to dothings like barbell hip thrusts I get Charlie horse cramps in my hamstrings. Keep in mind, I do an 8 to 12 minute dynamicwarmup prior to working out, as well as a static stretch routine nightly. Thanks for all your information and keep upthe great work. Jeff: Hey, Chris! Thanks for your question.It's actually a really, really good question

because cramping most often is not the resultof what we think it might be. You see, a lot of people think that crampingcomes from either being dehydrated, or low in sodium, or low in potassium. While those things might occur they reallyonly occur at such severe levels of depletion that you're probably going to have other thingsto worry about hand getting to the gym and doing your workout. You see, when you cramp â€“ especially duringa barbell hip thrust â€“ most often the result of that, or what's causing that, is a weaknessin another muscle group trying to do the job

of the muscle group that's too weak in thefirst place. Think about a barbell hip thrust. You shouldbe getting the strength from your gluts to drive you into hip extension; it's a hip extensionmachine. Your knees are bent so you think that you'vegot to push up to your hamstrings, but they hamstrings are probably trying to do the jobof the weak gluts and in doing so, they're not equipped to do it. It's like asking for help when the help'snot really there. The illequipped help, or muscles here â€“ hamstrings for hip extensionâ€“ are not going to do a really good job

doing it. So they're going to work and do their best,but become quickly seized up and cramped because they're being overtaxed and overloaded. Inthis case you're looking at a case, probably, of weak gluts. What you have to do is really start to switchyour mindset when you do your glut barbell thrust, or your glut exercises. Really focuson trying to initiated the movement with the gluts. Squeeze as hard as you possibly can. Squeeze like you've got your last dime betweenyour cheeks. It might work. Something, whatever

you can think about to try to drive that movementfrom the gluts first, and then allow the hamstrings to help. The same thing happens even whenyou're just doing a squat. You'd be amazed at how much your hamstringsactually help you with knee extension, not curling your knee up. That's why I don'treally like hamstring curl machines because they're not very functional. See, in functionyour hamstrings will actually work to extend your knee. Watch as I demonstrate here with the skeleton.See, as I take a step, we know that the hamstring wants to bend my knee back. Remember, thedescent into a squat or even as we walk, as

our knee bends; that's not active hamstringflexion. That's happening because we're giving intogravity. We're allowing the knee to bend as I take that step. What happens though is,in order to straighten ourselves out, if I didn't have to worry about it I could pullmy leg back openly here. You can see that the bone would move, theknee would flex and that's what the hamstring would do. That's what we think, that's whywe do hamstring curl machines. If I don't allow my foot to come off the ground â€“ whichis what's happening when we really walk, or run, or squat â€“ then that force is gettingblocked.